Yelp announced a series of new features for Yelp for Business today, including business-facing tools to give SMBs more control over Yelp ads and direct communications with users. For those unfamiliar, Yelp for Business is the company’s SMB portal for managing presence and promotion on Yelp.
For example, one new feature is keyword boosting. This lets SMBs that use Yelp Ads customize and optimize keywords that are most relevant to their business. They can do this by directing a portion of their Yelp ad budget to specific keywords (or blocking undesirable keywords) in a drag & drop way.
“Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses,” Yelp Group Product Manager Kathy Le told Localogy Insider. “With these features, we’re looking to not only provide better experiences that increase business owner engagement with our products – which can include responding to reviews on their Yelp for Business page or making new posts using Connect – but also to make their advertising dollars work harder for them.”
Full Slate
Going deeper on the full slate of new options in Yelp for Business, here’s a summarized list.
Keyword Boosting: As noted above, this lets SMBs specify priority (and blaclkisted) keywords in their ad budget for search marketing within Yelp.
Custom Location Targeting (CLT): This tool lets SMBs customize geographic locations where their Yelp Ads appear, enabling them to reach a wider audience beyond their immediate location. First announced last year for existing home and local services businesses, Yelp is now expanding CLT to all Yelp Ads customers.
Connect: Yelp Connect is an existing tool that lets SMBs engage directly with users. With this update, it’s easier for SMBs to share updates with Yelp users given new tailored post templates. They include example text to help SMBs write content that’s customizable to business or sutiational (think: seasonal) factors.
Ad Budgeting Tool: Yelp has enhanced its Yelp Ads budgeting feature that helps guide and optimize SMB campaign choices. Specifically, budget recommendations are now informed by additional data points like rating, category, listing age, and region.
Balancing Act
Notably, some of these features build on existing Yelp tools. For example, keyword boosting joins Yelp’s Keyword Blocking tool to blacklist terms. And the new templated features for customer outreach noted above build on the existing Yelp Connect tool. This signals Yelp’s ongoing evolution.
Synthesizing further themes in these updates, they represent a combination of feature expansion and simplification. This advances the ongoing goal of giving SMBs more control while keeping the business-facing UX streamlined and user-friendly. This is always a balancing act for SMB-facing software.
“We understand that business owners are busy and on a budget,” said Le “and we want to make Yelp’s products and features as simple to use and effective as possible.”
